Many years ago (back in the 90’s) my boss taught me about
WOWing your project teams, staff and clients.
What is a WOW? A WOW moment is an
unexpected act of courtesy and kindness.
Most often, they happen with spur of the moment ideas. These can be as simple as a hand written
note, helping a teammate move into their new house, seeing someone is having a
hard day and picking them up a starbucks coffee or even seeing a newspaper or
magazine article your teammate was featured in and getting it laminated.
A personal one that I had happen to me was the CEO of my
organization took me out on the track and let me drive his Austin Martin (this
still makes me smile, since I’m a car guy).
A recent WOW I gave to a person on my staff was tickets to a
Badger’s Men Basketball game. A few
weeks before this the person mentioned to me that they graduated from UW
Madison but had never been to a Men’s basketball game (and they had been
putting in a ton of extra time at work too).
A few weeks later a friend called and told me he was dropping off some
tickets for a game and I knew the perfect person to pass them on to. I wrote a card up and drop it at their
desk. The feedback from the rest of my
staff was that they opened the card, saw the tickets and just stared at them
with an open mouth for 2 minutes. I
think I got my WOW!
What is a HEROes?
Another element that I like to use on my teams is a bottom
up flow of ideas. Some people really embrace
these and I call them HEROes (Highly Empowered Resourceful Operatives; I read
about this in the book titled "Empowered" by authors Josh Bernoff and
Ted Shadler). The HEROes are driven by a
desire to create improvements on their own initiative rather than living with
the status quo. Once you identify a person
as a HEROes you need to embrace them and make sure they are leading your key
organizational changes and your key clients.
